Losing Weight on a GLP-1? Here's How to Protect Your Muscle
By Brad Tillery, Owner & Head Coach, BCS Fitness — College Station & Bryan, TX
Before I get into this, I want to say something directly to those of you on a GLP-1 right now.
You made a decision. You're down weight that wasn't coming off before. That's real, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise or lecture you about it. These medications are legitimate tools, and plenty of people are better off for them.
This isn't a warning. It's a way to make sure the thing you started actually gets you where you want to go.
A conversation that says it all
A client mentioned something to me a couple of weeks ago.
"I'm down 22 pounds since starting the shot… but I feel off for some reason."
I told her she'd seemed like she was dragging a bit lately.
"I'm always dragging now," she said. "I kind of assumed that was part of what I signed up for."
Part of what? "Losing the weight. Food just isn't on my mind anymore."
So I asked how much she was actually eating. "Honestly? Very little. I'm just never hungry."
That's the drug doing exactly what it's supposed to do — it shuts off the food noise. But the body still needs fuel to get through the day, repair muscle, and keep your head clear. Hers wasn't getting enough.
"But I'm losing weight," she said. "Isn't that the point?"
Depends what's coming off.
Key takeaways
GLP-1 medications work by reducing appetite — which can quietly leave you under-eating.
When you don't eat enough, your body burns muscle along with fat. Some research suggests muscle can account for up to 40% of the total weight lost on these medications.
Muscle protects your metabolism, bones, balance, and independence — especially after 40.
You don't have to stop the medication or force-feed yourself. You just have to protect the muscle with two things: protein and strength training.
Protein floor: roughly 100g/day for an average-built woman, 150g/day for an average-built man.
Do GLP-1 medications cause muscle loss?
They can — not because the medication is "bad," but because of how most people end up eating on it.
Some of the weight you lose is fat. Some of it is muscle. And on these medications, it can be a lot more muscle than people expect. Some research puts it as high as 40% of total weight lost. When you're barely eating, your body simply isn't getting what it needs to hold onto lean tissue.
Why would your body burn muscle when you have fat to spare?
Because your body doesn't care what looks good on you. When fuel doesn't show up, it goes into survival mode and breaks down whatever it can use — and muscle is easy to use.
Here's what makes this especially important after 40: you're already losing a little muscle every year just from aging. Not eating enough protein on top of that accelerates something that's genuinely hard to get back.
So is the shot working against you? No. The shot is working fine. It's the plate that isn't keeping up.
How do you keep muscle while losing fat on a GLP-1?
Here's the encouraging part: this is a completely solvable problem.
You don't have to stop the medication. You don't have to force yourself to eat tons of food you have no appetite for. You don't have to undo anything. You just have to protect the muscle while the fat comes off — and the two things that do that are things you may already be set up for.
1. Protein. Not more food overall — more protein inside the food you do eat. When your appetite is low, every bite has to work harder, so make it count.
2. Strength training. Lifting tells your body, "keep this muscle, we're still using it." That signal matters more right now than it ever has. Two focused strength sessions a week is enough to send it.
People on a GLP-1 who are also strength training and getting their protein in are in a genuinely great position: losing fat while keeping the muscle that protects their metabolism, bones, balance, and independence.
How much protein do you need on a GLP-1?
As a floor — not a ceiling — aim for roughly:
~100g per day for an average-built woman
~150g per day for an average-built man
That's the version of this that works. And if you're already strength training, you're halfway there just by showing up.
Your right-now action step
Pick ONE meal today where you'll eat protein even though you don't feel hungry for it. Eggs. Chicken. Greek yogurt. A protein shake if chewing feels like too much. Just one meal.
That's it. Start there and build.
Let's figure out your numbers
If you're on a GLP-1, come talk to me or one of your coaches. This is worth a real conversation, not a guess — we'll help you figure out what your protein and training should actually look like for your body and your goals. (And always keep your prescribing physician in the loop — we work alongside your medical care, not in place of it.)
You're not doing this wrong. You just need the plate to catch up.
Frequently asked questions
Does weight loss on a GLP-1 cause muscle loss? It can. When appetite drops and you under-eat, the body breaks down muscle as well as fat. Some research suggests muscle may account for up to 40% of total weight lost on these medications. Adequate protein and strength training sharply reduce that muscle loss.
How much protein should I eat on a GLP-1? As a general floor, aim for about 100g of protein per day for an average-built woman and about 150g per day for an average-built man. Focus on getting protein into the food you already eat rather than eating more food overall.
Do I have to stop my medication to keep muscle? No. You don't have to stop the medication or force-feed yourself. Protecting muscle is about prioritizing protein and strength training while the medication does its job.
Why does muscle matter so much after 40? Muscle protects your metabolism, bone density, balance, and independence — and you naturally lose some each year as you age. Keeping it is one of the most valuable things you can do for long-term health.
About the author
Brad Tillery is the owner and head coach of BCS Fitness, a strength and personal-training studio serving College Station and Bryan, Texas since 2003. BCS specializes in prescriptive, coach-led training for busy adults 40 and over, including members pursuing fat loss while on GLP-1 medications.
BCS Fitness South Studio: 3032 Barron Rd, Suite 100, College Station, TX 77845 Central Studio: 4301 Texas Ave, Suite 100, Bryan, TX 77802 Phone: 979-575-7871 · Web: bcsfitness.com
This article is educational and not medical advice. Always consult your prescribing physician before making changes related to your medication, nutrition, or exercise.
Starting Strength Training After 40 in Bryan–College Station: What Your First Month Actually Looks Like
If you're over 40 and thinking about starting strength training, you've probably had one of two thoughts: "I've waited too long," or "I'm going to get hurt."
You haven't waited too long. And getting hurt is exactly what a good first month is built to prevent.
Here's what your first four weeks actually look like at BCS Fitness, week by week, so you know exactly what you're walking into before you ever walk in.
Before you start: you don't need to be "in shape"
Most people who start with us haven't lifted in years, or ever. That's normal. You don't need to get in shape first. That's our job.
It's built around three things:
Safety first. Nobody touches a weight until we know how you move.
Small groups. Five people max, with a coach watching every rep.
Short sessions. Thirty minutes, twice a week. On the way home, not instead of it.
Week 1: A private 1-on-1 and movement screen
Your first session isn't a workout. It's a private 1-on-1 with a coach, just you.
We'll talk about what you want: more energy, keeping up with grandkids, getting off the couch without a groan, feeling strong again. We'll ask about old injuries, aches and anything your doctor has told you.
Then we'll do a movement screen. That's a handful of simple movements, like squatting to a box, reaching overhead and balancing, so we can see how your body moves today. Not how it moved at 25.
What you get out of it:
A starting point built around your body, not a generic plan
Clear limits on what we'll work around while you build up
A body-composition scan, so we have a real baseline to measure progress against
Most people leave this session saying the same thing: "That was way less scary than I expected."
Weeks 1–2: Your first small-group sessions
After your 1-on-1, you'll join a small group: five people max, one coach.
This isn't a big-box class where you copy the person in front of you. Everyone in the group works from their own plan, built from their movement screen. Your coach watches every rep, corrects your form in real time and adjusts on the spot if something doesn't feel right.
The first couple of weeks focus on the basics:
Learning the core movement patterns: squat, hinge, push, pull and carry
Finding the right starting weights, which are usually lighter than you'd expect
Getting comfortable in the studio and with your group
You'll probably be a little sore after the first few sessions. That's normal. You should never be hurt.
Weeks 2–3: Building the habit
By week two or three, something shifts. You know the movements. You know your group. Showing up stops being a decision and starts being part of your week.
That's why we keep sessions to 30 minutes. A workout that fits your schedule is one you'll actually keep doing.
At the end of your four weeks, we'll do another body-composition scan and compare it to your baseline.
We don't rely on the bathroom scale. When you start strength training, you can gain muscle and lose fat at the same time, and the scale barely moves. A body-composition scan shows what's actually changing underneath.
Just as important is what you'll notice outside the studio. Stairs feel easier. Groceries feel lighter. Getting up off the floor stops being a project.
Then we'll sit down together and talk about what's next, whether that's continuing with your group or adjusting your plan.
What you won't do
Some of the hesitation about starting comes from what people picture a gym to be. Here's what your first month isn't:
No yelling coaches or boot-camp punishment workouts
No guessing what to do or how to use the equipment
No random workouts. Every session follows your plan
No lifting before you're screened
No crowds. Five people max, every session
Common questions
Do I need any experience? No. Most people who start with us are beginners or haven't trained in years.
What if I have an old injury or a health condition? Tell us at your 1-on-1, and check with your doctor before starting any new exercise program. We'll build your plan around what you can safely do and progress from there.
How long are sessions? Thirty minutes, 2-3x a week.
How big are the groups? Five people max, with one coach.
Where are you located? We have two studios in Bryan–College Station: 4301 S Texas Ave in Bryan and 3032 Barron Rd in College Station.
How much does it cost? Our new clients who start working with coach invest $109/every 14 days for their training plus a one time $99 enrollment fee.
Your next step
Our next Strong Start group begins Monday, November 2. To get you in, we just need to schedule your private 1-on-1 the week before.
Not ready to book? Text or call us with any question, and you'll get a straight answer from a coach, not a sales pitch.
Why Strength Training IS Longevity Training
By Brad Tillery
A client asked me something a few weeks ago that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
“I’ve got a buddy doing cold plunges, red light, peptides, the whole thing. He’s spending a fortune. Am I missing something?”
I asked him one question back.
“Is he lifting?”
He thought about it. “I don’t actually know.”
That’s the whole problem with how longevity gets sold right now.
I’ve had more conversations about longevity in the last six months than in the previous twenty-two years combined. People come in asking about hormone optimization, peptide therapy, cryotherapy, GLP-1s, and whatever protocol just hit their podcast feed. There’s an entire industry built around the word now, and almost all of it is pointed at adults 40 and up.
Which happens to be exactly who I’ve been coaching since 2003.
So let me say the thing that industry isn’t saying clearly...
You can’t buy your way to longevity. You have to build it.
And the thing you build it out of is muscle.
What the research keeps circling back to
Researchers studying healthy aging have measured just about everything that might predict how well a person ages. Cholesterol. Cardiovascular markers. Cognitive scores. Sleep. Inflammation. Hormone panels.
Two things keep showing up near the top of that list over and over: aerobic fitness, and muscle.
Grip strength alone, which is one of the cheapest measurements in medicine, is one of the most reliable predictors of all-cause mortality we have. Not because your hands matter that much. Because grip strength is a window into how much muscle you’ve kept.
And the reason muscle predicts so much is pretty straightforward.
Muscle isn’t just what moves you. It’s what protects your metabolism, your blood sugar, your bone density, your balance, your joints, and your independence. It burns energy around the clock. It pulls glucose out of your bloodstream. It gives you the capacity to catch yourself when you trip, carry groceries up the stairs, and pick up a grandkid without thinking twice about it.
When you lose it, you lose the thing that was quietly holding all of that together.
And after 40, you lose it faster than you build it unless you train on purpose.
Why longevity has gotten so muddy
Walk through any longevity marketing in 2026 and you’ll see the same stuff. Cryotherapy chambers. Red light panels. Peptide protocols. Continuous glucose monitors. GLP-1 injections. Hormone panels.
Expensive. Technical. Impressive looking.
And I want to be fair here, because some of it is legitimate. GLP-1s are a real tool for the right person. Recovery modalities help somebody who’s actually training hard. Lab work catches things you’d otherwise miss. I’m not knocking any of it.
But here’s what nobody in that marketing says out loud...
All of it is additive. None of it is foundational.
A cold plunge on top of a body that’s steadily losing muscle doesn’t do what you think it does.
A GLP-1 that drops your weight without protecting your muscle leaves you lighter and weaker. You’ll like the scale. You won’t like what happens at 75.
Peptides optimizing your recovery don’t matter much if there’s nothing to recover from.
The foundation is strength. Everything else is what you add once the foundation is there. Not what you use instead of it.
What strength training actually does after 40
I’ll keep this part short, because the science is boring right up until it’s your body.
Two well-programmed strength sessions a week, with progressive loading and an actual coach watching your form, does six things at the same time.
It builds and preserves lean muscle, which drives your metabolism every hour of every day. It improves insulin sensitivity, which protects you from the metabolic drift most 40+ bodies go through. It loads your bones so they stay dense and resist fracture. It trains your nervous system to catch you, steady you, and keep you upright. It reinforces the joints and connective tissue that have to carry you another forty years. And it builds real-world capability, the kind that lets you keep doing the things you actually love.
No supplement does that. No injection does that. No infrared chamber does that.
Only training does.
What this looks like with us
We’ve been coaching adults 40+ since 2003. Twenty-two years of watching what works and what doesn’t. Here’s where we landed.
Five clients per coach. Never more. You can’t program strength properly for a room of twenty. You can for a room of five. The ratio isn’t a marketing number. It’s what real coaching requires.
Programming that builds on itself. Your body adapts to what you ask of it. If every workout is random, you never give it the signal to get stronger. We write programs that compound week over week.
30 minutes, on the calendar. Short enough to survive a real life. Structured enough that no minute gets wasted. And scheduled, so the question is never “do I feel like it today.” That question is already answered.
People who stay. Our average client has been with us 37 months. Our coaches stay too. That’s what makes it possible to actually program for YOUR body across years, instead of whatever the room is doing today.
What I want you to take from this
Longevity is a real goal. Maybe the most important one you can have after 40.
But it isn’t a protocol you buy. It’s a foundation you build.
If you’ve got the foundation, every add-on compounds on top of it. If you don’t, no amount of technology or intervention covers the hole where the muscle should be.
So if you’re sitting there thinking about your next twenty or thirty years and wondering where to start...
Start here. Not because strength is new or interesting, but because it’s the one thing that keeps showing up in the research, and the one thing that only works if you actually do it.
Your first step is a conversation. Not a burpee.
It’s a free phone call. We’ll talk about where you are, where you want to be, and whether we’re the right place to build it.
Get Your Cardio. Just Not While You're Getting Your Strength Work In.
What that rest between sets is actually doing, and why cutting it costs you the thing you came for.
Somewhere in the last twenty years, "keep your heart rate up" became the definition of a good workout.
That advice isn't wrong. It's just in the wrong place.
If you've ever been in a session where the coach cuts your rest to keep you moving, or where the whole point was to stay breathless for forty-five minutes, you've had your strength work turned into conditioning. You worked hard. You sweated. And you almost certainly didn't get much stronger.
What the rest is actually for
Most people think the ninety seconds between sets is recovery from the last set. It's partly that. But its real job is the next one.
Your muscles run on a fuel source that depletes fast under heavy effort and takes a couple of minutes to come back. Rest long enough and your next set can be genuinely heavy. Cut it short and it can't, no matter how willing you are.
That's the whole mechanism. Rest isn't the break between the work. It's what makes the work possible.
Cut the rest and the weight has to come down
This is the part nobody says out loud.
If you're going to move continuously for thirty minutes, the load has to be light enough to move continuously for thirty minutes. There's no other option. So the weight drops, the reps climb, and the session becomes a very tiring way to lift something you could have lifted anyway.
You'll finish soaked. You'll feel like you did something. And the stimulus that actually drives strength and bone density was never really present.
That trains something. Just not the thing you're here for.
To be fair to it, that style of training isn't useless. It builds work capacity and it burns calories in the moment.
But muscle and bone respond to load. Not to a number on your watch, and not to how hard you were breathing. They respond to being asked to handle something heavy, recovering, and being asked again.
If you're forty-five and worried about what your body looks like at seventy, load is the lever. It's not the only thing that matters, but it's the thing that needs a coach, a barbell, and a plan. Which is exactly why it shouldn't be diluted with something you can get for free.
So go and get your cardio
Here's what this isn't: an argument against conditioning.
Your heart is a real priority and you should train it. Walk. Ride. Hike. Get out of breath on purpose. Do it often enough that it's a normal part of your week rather than something you schedule.
Do it on your own time, away from the weights, where it can actually be the point rather than a side effect. Both things work better when they're not competing for the same thirty minutes.
What a real week looks like
Two or three strength sessions here, each thirty minutes of programmed work plus a warm-up. Heavy enough to matter, with enough rest between sets that heavy is possible.
Then the rest of your movement out in the world. Walking after dinner. A bike ride on Saturday. Stairs instead of the elevator. Whatever you'll actually do repeatedly.
That combination is unremarkable and it works. It also fits inside a real life, which is why our average member has been training with us thirty-seven months.
Where to start
If your last program left you exhausted and nothing changed, the problem probably wasn't effort. It was that the effort went somewhere it couldn't compound.
Book a Discovery Call. Fifteen minutes, and we'll tell you honestly whether we're the best fit for you. If we're not, we'll point you toward who is.
Call or text 979-575-7871.
BCS Fitness has been coaching busy adults 40+ in Bryan-College Station since 2003. Two studios: South in College Station, Central in Bryan.